When I was a kid, we definitely did not check the UV index before going to the pool:
The scale was developed by Canadian scientists in 1992, and then adopted and standardized by the UN’s World Health Organization and World Meteorological Organization in 1994.
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The UV index is a linear scale that measures the intensity of UV radiation with respect to sunburn. For example, assuming similar spectral power distributions, radiation with a UV index of 12 is twice as intense as radiation at a UV index of 6. For a wide range of timescales, sunburn in response to controlled UV radiation occurs in proportion to the total number of photons delivered, not varying with the intensity or duration of exposure. Therefore, under similar conditions, a person who develops a sunburn after 30 minutes of exposure to UV index 6 radiation would most likely develop a sunburn of similar severity after 15 minutes of exposure to UV index 12 radiation, since it is twice the intensity but half the duration. This linear scale is unlike other common environmental scales such as decibels or the Richter scale, which are logarithmic (the severity multiplies for each step on the scale, growing exponentially).
An index of 0 corresponds to zero UV radiation, as is essentially the case at night. An index of 10 corresponds roughly to midday summer sunlight in the tropics with a clear sky when the UV index was originally designed; now summertime index values in the tens are common for tropical latitudes, mountainous altitudes, areas with ice/water reflectivity and areas with above-average ozone layer depletion.