An improvement of a theorem of Heinrich, Mankiewicz, Sims, and Yost

Heinrich, Mankiewicz, Sims, and Yost proved that every separable subspace of a Banach space $Y$ is contained in a separable ideal in $Y$. We improve this result by replacing the term “ideal” with the term “almost isometric ideal”. As a consequence of this we obtain, in terms of subspaces, characterizations of diameter 2 properties, the Daugavet property along with the properties of being an almost square space and an octahedral space.