I’ve been following the state of Vermont’s travel maps for months now, and watching the grim progression of the “red zone” closer and closer to our borders. Through it all, I’ve gotten a bit of visual comfort from Vermont’s apparent exemption from the great red tide.

But, as others have noted this week, that comfort was entirely without foundation. The blue lagoon shouldn’t be blue at all; it should be a mix of red, yellow and green. You don’t get that if you just glance at the map. But if you check the fine print, you see that the three shades of blue correspond to red, yellow and green. By the standards of this map, my county (Washington) is in the red zone, the no-travel zone.

The shades of blue for Vermont are a deliberate choice by the creator of the map — the Department of Financial Regulation. And it’s deeply misleading. It feeds into our innate sense that Vermont is different, better, and at least somewhat immune from the problems that beset all the other states. Like we have an invisible, ineffable moat around our borders.

In truth, if the same color scheme was used throughout, Vermont’s counties would be roughly equally red, yellow and green. And in fact, the situation has already worsened; we learned at the Scott administration’s Friday Covid briefing that roughly one-half of Vermont counties would be colored red if the out-of-state standards were applied.

If I were to ask why Vermont’s counties were colored in blue, the response would probably be, “Well, this is a travel map, and we want to showcase the areas where it’s safe to travel from. Vermont isn’t part of that equation.”

Okay, well, maybe. But at the very least, they should use a different set of much flashier colors instead of three subtly differing shades of the same hue. Maybe orange, purple and blue?

This is the state’s travel map. But it’s also the state’s primary (perhaps only) visual representation of the spread of the coronavirus. The map should be recrafted to accurately impart that message as well.