Yeah, that's true. Keeping yourself safe in this pandemic is much more important! For now, you could keep the hard-drive somewhere nice and safe - no rattles, vibrations. Personally, I'd consider trying and run a Windows Command Prompt CHKDSK or SCANNOW line to see what's what, and maybe fix it. But then again, I'm reckless like that, and this does look more of a hardware issue as you said, and not a corruption of the data.

Safer to wait around for a data recovery expert to pull out whatever it can from it. Take care, and stay safe :-)