I would suggest epidemiologists provide some set of problems all this useless but willing pile of software engineers could apply themselves to. For example, scraping data from mismatched data sources or implementing specific hypothetical models. Even if it's only marginally useful, it would give them something to do other then misinformation.

That is what epidemiologists do nowdays and did from the beginning. They don't calculate models on paper anymore.

It's likely that epidemiologists already use those tools. They are, after all, a sort of applied statisticians.