WASHINGTON (BLOOMBERG) - US Secretary of State Michael Pompeo is urging the country's allies to re-examine the risks of using Huawei Technologies telecommunications equipment in light of China's handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

"I am very confident that at this moment, this moment where the Chinese Communist Party failed to be transparent and open and handle data in an appropriate way, will cause many, many countries to rethink what they were doing with respect to their telecom architecture," Mr Pompeo said on Friday (April 17) in an interview with Fox Business.

"And when Huawei comes knocking to sell them equipment and hardware, that they will have a different prism through which to view that decision," he said. "I'm hopeful that that's the case."

While President Donald Trump and Mr Pompeo have blamed China for failing to disclose the extent of the Covid-19 infection early in its spread in Wuhan, Mr Pompeo took the criticism a step further by tying it to their continuing campaign to convince other nations that using Chinese technology in next-generation 5G telecommunications networks could open a backdoor to spying.

Mr Pompeo said the Trump administration has been consistent in warning about the "threats that are posed from allowing the Chinese Communist Party to own the infrastructure", and cited Huawei and ZTE as examples of that.