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Article History

Received: 4 September 2025

Accepted: 10 March 2026

First Online: 17 March 2026

Declarations

:

: This study was conducted in accordance with applicable Dutch legislation and the Declaration of Helsinki. Specifically, for the data collected by the researchers as part of the pilot study on air cleaning devices, ethical approval and the requirement to obtain informed consent were waived by the UMC Utrecht internal review board, as this study was not subject to the Dutch Medical Research Involving Human Subjects Act (WMO), and did not require approval under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), as no directly identifiable data were used. In addition, aggregated and anonymized school absenteeism datasets were obtained from The Implementation Group, in accordance with their data sharing policy. We also received a dataset on ARI-related primary care visits from the Nivel Primary Care Database, which has been approved according to the governance code of Nivel Primary Care Database, under number NZR-00324.002. The use of electronic health records for research purposes is allowed under certain conditions. When these conditions are fulfilled, neither obtaining informed consent from patients nor approval by a medical ethics committee is obligatory for this type of observational studies containing no directly identifiable data (art. 24 GDPR Implementation Act jo art. 9.2 sub j GDPR).

: Not applicable.

: The authors declare no competing interests.