Three guests check into a hotel room. The manager says the bill is $30, so each guest pays $10. Later the manager realizes the bill should only have been $25. To rectify this, he gives the bellhop $5 as five one-dollar bills to return to the guests.
On the way to the guests' room to refund the money, the bellhop realizes that he cannot equally divide the five one-dollar bills among the three guests. As the guests aren't aware of the total of the revised bill, the bellhop decides to just give each guest $1 back and keep $2 as a tip for himself, and proceeds to do so.
As each guest got $1 back, each guest only paid $9, bringing the total paid to $27. The bellhop kept $2, which when added to the $27, comes to $29. So if the guests originally handed over $30, what happened to the remaining $1?

 Perhaps you are already aware of that story, it dates back to the 1930s at least.  How about this one:

In Florida during the Covid 19 outbreak 1,500,000 people have been tested for the virus.  In Jacksonville 75,000 have been tested.  Jacksonville is the third largest metropolitan area in Florida so we should have tested 1/3 as many people which would have been 500,000.  Obviously we aren't testing nearly enough people.

  The problem we face today is in large part the lack of understanding of mathematics on the part of the public at large as well as the news media who are trying to find something inflammatory to say.  

 

New Edit:  I realized belatedly that there are some people who didn't get this, so I am going to re-visit the issue and explain it.   The facts I list in the first two sentences and the first part of the third one in the story about Jacksonville are accurate.  The conclusion in the second half of the third sentence is just as ridiculous as the hotel story.  The fact that Jacksonville is the third largest metropolitan area has no bearing on the problem discussed.  Factually, it would have said that Jacksonville has about 4% of the population of Florida as a whole and therefore should have vaccinated 4% of 1,500,000 or 60,000 people.  We actually were well ahead of the state as a whole.