Question: I read somewhere that Tennessee has the highest total number of COVID cases per capita in the country.  Is that true? 

Answer: Sadly for Tennesseans, it is true.  In total and to date, Tennessee has had 17,518 cases per 100,000 population.  This is more than 3x the cases/population in Vermont.  For further comparison, the US as a whole has had 13,062 cases per 100,000 population.  For more state-level data, see the NYTimes tracker.  For my own interest, I plotted total cases/population by % of pop fully vaccinated for all 50 states.  As Figure 1 shows, there’s a strong association between cases and vaccinations; states with higher cases/pop have lower vaccination coverage while states with lower cases/pop have higher vaccination coverage. 

Figure 1. States with higher vaccination coverage have lower cases/population (rendered by me using data from the NYTimes tracker)