Sorry - as a GSS statistician going to stick up for the presentation here.
It is a perfectly valid way of presenting data on a chart whose sole purpose is to tell you the relative performance between different areas at a given point in time.
Using the same colour scheme today as you did in January when you had rates as high as 1,600 per 100,000 would just be pointless - For an example of how silly that looks take a look at the London Data Store graphs on prevalence -
https://data.london.gov.uk/dataset/coronavirus--covid-19--cases - since end of January the graph is just purple for all boroughs which tells you nothing.
Now if you had the two charts side-by-side in a single publication that would be a different story
And while it is cute to think that politicians are telling statisticians what colours to make things on charts that really isn't a thing.