Welcome to TechSequences. On December 30th, 2019, a 34-year-old Chinese ophthalmologist named Li Wenliang wrote a message to his medical school alumni on the Chinese messaging app WeChat. This otherwise unremarkable exchange between university alumni would come to mark the beginning of a global public health crisis and define the inadequacy of the response that danger had posed. Dr. Wenliang later said that all he wanted to do was to remind his university classmates to be careful. In the WeChat post, he warned his classmates about a SARS-like illness that he had observed in seven patients who happened to work in the same seafood market in Wuhan. Dr. Wenliang's warning was ignored, and he was silenced by both medical officials and the police. Exactly a month later, the World Health Organization would declare a public health emergency, and just six days later, Dr. Wenliang would succumb to the very same virus he had warned about.