The director of the US National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr Anthony Fauci, has warned that some hospitals in the United States are growing close to reaching full capacity as COVID-19 continues to spread and soon officials could be making choices about who gets an ICU bed, CNN reported on Monday.

Dr Fauci told CNN that the best way to prevent health care workers from having to make those tough choices is to "pull out all the stops on everything we can do to prevent new infections."

Masking is important, Fauci stated, but "vaccination is the number one" method of lowering hospitalisations.

According to data from the US Department of Health and Human Services, across the US, 79.83% of ICU beds are in use, almost a third of which are occupied by COVID-19 patients,

Eight states had more than 90% of their adult ICU beds occupied Sunday, namely Alabama, Georgia, Texas, Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi, Nevada and Kentucky.

With the spread of the highly transmissible Delta COVID-19 virus variant disrupting life across the US, officials and health experts are working toward administering a booster dose of vaccine to Americans, CNN noted.