Our findings are partially in line with the few other studies investigating the effect of air pollution on RV or other respiratory viral infections: Capistrano and colleagues studied the effect of biomass smoke extract exposure on RV‐16 infection in primary human lung fibroblasts and found no effect on viral load and IL6, but higher levels of CXCL8 (Capistrano et al., 2016). Here, IL6 is linked to infection.