I am not sure how this bar chart stats is misinterpreted to total claims when it is showing cumulative data.
It's the total initial claims that were filed. In other words it captures all the people who lost their job and then filed for unemployment benefits. Some of those people have found work since then. I still think it's a meaningful metric because when people lose full-time jobs they are often replaced by temporary or part-time jobs, or they involve transitioning from an employee to IC or gig worker.
You can refer this news release of bureau of labor statistics(bls) for accurate numbers: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf
Buried in the fine print of that unemployment report:
The BLS determines how many people are unemployed based on a household survey. Survey interviewers misclassified several furloughed workers as being “absent from work due to ‘other reasons,’” according to the BLS.
That’s the same category of workers who’d be on vacation, for example.
The overall unemployment rate would have been “about 3 percentage points higher than reported” if those individuals had been identified correctly, according to the agency. (The estimate isn’t seasonally adjusted.)
That would put the official unemployment rate at 16.3%.
The true rate could be higher still.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/05/heres-why-the-real-unemployment-rate-may-be-higher-than-reported.html
My back of the envelope calculations say they knowingly under counted by like 4-5 million people.