As you post elsewhere, at peak unemployment there were about 23 million unemployment claims in a week (May 9th). But in the months leading up to that there were people who lost their jobs but were no longer claiming unemployment by May 9th. And in the weeks after that, there were new people who were still added to the unemployment rolls even as the overall number went down (because some of those 23 million were no longer claiming unemployment). So the total number of new claims for unemployment during the pandemic was much higher than 23 million.
You can run the weekly reports here: https://oui.doleta.gov/unemploy/wkclaims/report.asp
It looks to me like there were just over 70.3 million initial claims in 2020 and 4.6 million initial claims in Jan 2021, which adds up to about 75 million instead of 76 million. This article from Entrepreneur (https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/367826) claims 76 million (perhaps where Sanders got the number from?), but you can't see the parameters of their search. Perhaps they started in the last week of 2019.
The news comes just months after the Commonwealth Fund revealed that as many as 7.7 million workers had lost jobs with employer-sponsored insurance by June 2020. The startling figure is largely attributed to a mostly nationwide shutdown of businesses amid a pandemic. By Jan. 23, 2021 that number swelled as over 76 million people had lost work (with and without employer-sponsored health insurance), data from the Department of Labor shows.
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