As the coronavirus becomes the all-consuming news story of the moment, the Financial Times decided to invite an extremely apropos guest for this weekend's "Lunch with the FT". That guest is: Belgian scientist Peter Piot, the "Mick Jagger of Microbes", best known for discovering the Ebola virus.

Obviously well-qualified, how does Piot feel about COVID-19? He didn't mince words: "This is serious."

"I'm not the scaremongering type," he says. "But I think this is serious in the sense that we can't afford not to consider it as a serious threat."

"It could be that, indeed, it's going to be over in a few months," he continues, crunching into a tempura-covered sage leaf. "But just take the counterfactual. We say, 'OK, it's fine and we don't do anything.' I bet that we would already have had far more cases in Singapore, the UK, Germany. Let's not forget, we are already well over 1,000 deaths. That's not a detail."

The interview took place on Feb. 13, which means that since Piot made these comments, 1,500 more people have died, and serious outbreaks have emerged in Iran, South Korea and Italy. Saudi Arabia has halted pilgrimages to Mecca, and Japanese PM Shinzo Abe has asked all schools in the country to close.