Question: Can I get the virus from swimming in a pool or the ocean?

Answer: The journal, Water Resources, recently published a research paper that addresses this issue, “Coronavirus in water environments: Occurrence, persistence and concentration methods.” I’ve copied their overarching findings in the below paragraph, but in short, coronaviruses can’t survive in treated water — swimming pools are not reservoirs of virus and you cannot get the virus from swimming in a pool, hot tub or the like. When it comes to other bodies of water that aren’t treated — lakes and oceans for example — we have less solid data. Even so, there seems to be general consensus among experts that the dilution effect in lakes and oceans would be so much that it would be basically impossible to get infected this way. So far, there are no known cases of transmission from lakes, oceans, and other bodies of freshwater. Based on the data we do have, it seems that water temperature dictates how infectious the virus remains with infectivity declining more rapidly in warmer water (temps 73°f and higher). Upshot is, the water part of swimming does not carry virus transmission risk. Rather, it’s the people part — if you are at a beach or in a pool with others, then the transmission risk comes from respiratory spread. If you do choose to go swimming, avoid being among crowds of people, keep 6+ feet of distance, and as possible, stay upwind!

“The data available suggest that: i) CoV seems to have a low stability in the environment and is very sensitive to oxidants, like chlorine; ii) CoV appears to be inactivated significantly faster in water than non-enveloped human enteric viruses with known waterborne transmission; iii) temperature is an important factor influencing viral survival (the titer of infectious virus declines more rapidly at 23°C-25 °C than at 4 °C); iv) there is no current evidence that human coronaviruses are present in surface or ground waters or are transmitted through contaminated drinking-water; v) further research is needed to adapt to enveloped viruses the methods commonly used for sampling and concentration of enteric, non enveloped viruses from water environments.”