Aiym Bakytbaikyzy

Hi, my name is Aiym Bakytbaikyzy and I use she/her pronouns. I am a junior double majoring in Biology and Philosophy, and minoring in German Studies. I am from Kazakhstan, Almaty (pictured to the left). In my leisure I enjoy horse riding, swimming, learning foreign languages, and reading fiction.

November 23, 2020:

So overall, drawing lessons from South Korea and Peru’s experiences with the pandemic, it looks like having a well-funded and thoroughly organised public health system in place before any epidemic hits is the key to appropriately face it and have as few cases as possible. The US needs to reconsider the pros and cons of having a universal health care system and perhaps the current pandemic would serve as a nudge for the country to reevaluate the relative importances of ideologies à la “the governments need to be out of our lives” and a competent centralised healthcare system, which could give American better lives, not to mention the fact that it would boost up the probability that they’d survive in a pandemic.

November 28, 2020:

It is interesting to note that this virus has a remarkably low mutation rate, compared to its cousins — the regular influenza has two times more mutations per sample (Mercatelli and Giorgi, 2020). The bad news is that this is explained by the fact that the SARS-CoV-2 virus is already great at its job of infecting humans and needs very few, if any, tweaks to its genome to optimise its infectiousness. The good news is that this low mutation rate makes it the vaccine development process quite a bit easier.