This has little to do with bitcoin tough... These are just scammers that have found their scamming niche.
In the newspaper i read, there are articles of fiat-scammers using the corona crisis on a daily basis... Yesterday there was a story of a 95 year old widow that was scammed by somebody that promised to go to the shop for her and buy the groceries she needed to survive... The bastard just ran with the money, leaving the old woman completely helpless and isolated, without food...
A couple days before, there was a story of people going door-to-door collecting money to help corona-victims using one of those big organisations (don't remember if it was doctors without boundarys, or the red cross,...). Offcourse they were not affiliated, and just plain scammers using human misery to enrich themselfs.
Just as bad are all the news reports of doctors and nurses having their cars broken into by people searching for facemasks and hand sanitizers. Imagine risking your life on a daily basis by treating people that are infected, going to your car after a full shift and then having to deal with the fact your windshield is smashed because you had an indication of being a doctor or a nurse posted on your windshield...
It's human nature, most of us are honest people, some are bad seeds... It doesn't matter if they try to scam by asking btc using a spam mailing list, or if they go around trying to steal money face-to-face. Bad situations seem to fuel those people, it seems that the willingness of good people to do good things leads to bad people having an extra incentive trying to steal from the good people.
Yeah, this isn't exclusive to Bitcoin, and is happening every day with fiat currencies. Not just for the corona pandemic, but also other viruses which have existed before; Think Ebola, and SARS. Most people are somewhat decent, and just tend to wander off the path a little, before finding their path again. No one is perfect, but I don't think that excuses those that are exploiting a pandemic or any other virus for that matter. There are some crimes, and "scummy" behaviour that you can forgive, and give another chance. But, when you are exploiting something as important as health, and robbing people of money when they could need it the most because of the record amount of people out of jobs, this is probably inexcusable.
This is definitely bad news for Bitcoin, but not exclusively. Its bad news for all currencies, and humanity that people will stoop this low in crisis.