Note: The article is neither about Dürer nor about the same times, and even less about polyhedra:
The article is about 1348 Black Death effect on Siena, Italy.
"The speed of the Black Death was so staggering that in just over a year it had conquered the known medieval world, reducing the population of each country by an average of 45%." (the author should have just said "halving the population of each country").
"The Sienese, like their medieval European Christian counterparts, suffered under the conviction that all diseases came from God. They took the Black Death as proof of their guilt."
"The church encouraged such supernatural explanations. Many priests refused to bless the infected on the grounds that they were receiving God’s punishment. Most of the believers devoted themselves to prayer and penitential practices, repairing churches and setting up religious houses. The papacy became more powerful. Ideas and the very structure of people’s values shifted."
Dürer lived 1471 - 1528, more than century later, and, AFAIK never in Siena.
Apparently Durer made a still-unresolved conjecture about polyhedra.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gw_SgnlSdk