Germany is a pioneer in waste management but struggles to clean up cities. Contaminated water, the destruction of the sewer system and the bad smell are conducive to the spread of disease that is now the authorities' main concern. In a week, the cleaning teams, consisting of firefighters and the army, managed to remove enough to make the roads passable, creating large dumps of domestic garbage and causing a bad smell due to dead animals and spoiled food, leading to the spread of bacteria, mice, and viruses that pose a severe problem. The German government has announced that it will not be possible to dispose of all waste at the local level, and help will be needed at the national level, with appeals being launched on social networks to help eliminate "unimaginable amounts" of garbage. The extreme rains that caused the devastating floods are in themselves a catastrophe, but the waste crisis caused by them is a challenge that took months to solve.

A year later, around 80 million people were infected, 45 recovered, and 1.8 million died worldwide and, up today (February 8, 2021) more than 106 million people were infected, about half of which have already recovered, and more than 2.3 million died. The COVID-19 crisis is an unprecedented challenge for our societies. The symptoms of COVID-19 are various and can be confused with flu or simple cold symptoms. Most infected people develop the disease with mild to moderate symptoms and recover without the need for hospitalization. Several pharmaceutical companies developed the vaccine in record time and began to be administered in late 2020 / early 2021 in several countries.

Due to the "Great Confinement", that left cities around the world deserted, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) predicts a drop of 3% in the world economy, dragged by a contraction of 5.9% in the United States, 7.5% in the eurozone, and 5.2% in Japan. However, this data can worsen dramatically. The third wave of the pandemic that is being felt across Europe and the new restrictive measures are already having visible consequences in different sectors of the economy.

The end of this pandemic is not yet predictable. However, we can already state at this moment that "after coronavirus, the world will not go back to what it was".