. WASHINGTON — The nation dramatically stepped up its surveillance for coronavirus variants in recent weeks, but experts say there's much further to go if the Washington region — and the rest of the country — wants to stay ahead of new and potentially dangerous versions of the virus. Conducting the genetic sequencing to detect for variants is far more expensive, time-consuming and sophisticated than testing whether people have contracted the coronavirus, leading to a patchwork system where some states aggressively seek out variants and others lag behind. "There are definitely states where they really champion this," said Duncan MacCannell, chief science officer for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Office of Advanced Molecular Detection. "But, you know, there's also a lot of blanks (on the map), dark spots, places where we just don't have regular sequence data."