Registered voters in Escambia County received an email from Escambia County Commissioner Doug Underhill on Monday calling for loosening social distancing measures as federal public health experts warn the worst of the coronavirus crisis is in the weeks ahead.

Underhill said he sent the email to all voters in the county who provided their emails when they registered, all members of the Florida Legislature and all Florida county commissioners to share what he said were facts about COVID-19.

In the email, Underhill said he believes the facts "support caution, but not fear and frenzy."

Underhill said he wants to reopen the county's beaches, which are currently closed through April 2, and called on the governor to allow restaurants to return to on-site dining at 50% capacity.

Underhill told the News Journal that he has received positive praise for the email from "other Republican and conservative leaders throughout the state" but did not specify who.

"It's time for us to start getting a different kind of dialogue, not fear and anger dialogue, but the data-driven dialogue," he said.

In his email, Underhill said that based on the state's testing, the contraction rate for COVID-19 is lower than first feared, and while some models showed higher contraction rates, health experts, including those on President Donald Trump's coronavirus task force, have said that with social distancing measures in place, the rates of the virus spread would slow.

Even with social distancing, the virus remains contagious. Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told Atlanta public radio station WABE on Monday that the virus is probably three times as infectious as the flu.

Redfield also said the percentage of people who get the coronavirus and show no symptoms but still transmit the virus may be at 25%, and it appears people with symptoms become contagious as many as 48 hours before they start experiencing symptoms.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has said that even with social distancing measures in place, the United States could still see 100,000 deaths from the virus.

"It would not have been a good idea to pull back at a time when you really needed to be pressing your foot on the pedal as opposed to on the brakes," Fauci said on CNN.

Also in his email, Underhill said that at the time, there had only been one hospitalization from Escambia County's 30 confirmed cases, which he said didn't show a large impact on the health care system. His email did not include the number of hospitalized cases in neighboring Santa Rosa County, whose residents often use Escambia County hospitals.

Since his email, Escambia County has now 94 confirmed cases with two hospitalizations, and Santa Rosa County has 44 cases with seven hospitalizations and two deaths, according to numbers released by the Florida Department of Health on Tuesday evening.

Health experts don't expect the number of cases to peak in most of the country until mid-April.

Federal officials have said that a projection from the University of Washington Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation influenced the decision to extend social distancing guidelines until April 30. That model doesn't show coronavirus cases peaking until May 3 and projects a shortage of 297 intensive care unit beds in Florida on that day.

Ali Mokdad, a professor at the University of Washington, told the Miami Herald that the model assumes Florida will implement a stay-at-home order by next Monday, an action that Gov. Ron DeSantis has resisted.

Underhill also claimed as fact that the state's environment is "not as conducive to COVID-19," despite the largest outbreak of the virus occurring in the warmest part of the state with more than 3,600 case in Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade counties, as of Tuesday morning.

Health experts such as Fauci have said publicly that it is too early to know if hot climates affect the virus. The World Health Organization in its published lists of "myth busting" about the coronavirus states the virus has been reported in countries with hot weather, and hot weather does not prevent the spread of the virus.

Underhill rejected the idea that his email contradicted health experts, saying much of what has been put out to the public is driven by computer models.

"Modeling and simulation has been grossly misused ever since the Al Gore era," Underhill said. "And we've seen that there's a lot of things that can be proven by modeling and simulation (that) end up not happening in real world."

The email was sent through Underhill's campaign account, despite him not being an active candidate.

"I used that email address because our county government continues to resist modern communication methods, such as social media, and mass emailing," Underhill said.

He defended sending the email and said the public has a right to know what's in his mind on public policy decisions.

"The citizens have a right to know what's in the mind of the five men (on the County Commission) who makes decisions that affect their ability to feed their children," Underhill said.

Jim Little can be reached at jwlittle@pnj.com and 850-208-9827.