According to the South Dakota Department of Health site, they 36.2% of the ICU beds are currently available [1]. According to this article [2], that count includes NICU (infant) beds, which will not be very helpful for COVID-19, which mostly seriously infects adults.
I've looked into these states and its really hard to get a good idea how close we are. There are easy solutions to quickly expanding ICU beds:
1) moving patients who don't need to be in ICU back to the regular wards. Hospitals tend to have a "use it or lose it" view of ICU beds.
2) you can turn regulars ward beds into ICU beds fairly quickly.
The limiting factor is essentially the doctors/nurses/staff. They are able to squeeze more space by forcing doctors/nurses/staff to work longer hours. But you can't shift radiology doctors/nurses to ICU since they aren't qualified.
We'll know things are bad when there is a call for doctors from less hard areas to fly to the infected areas.
Long story short, its hard to know as layperson what % is bad, so we should just listen to the experts.
I have wondered that myself, and it's a valid consideration.
Anecdotally, I've seen quite a few people who work in and around ERs and ICUs reporting a sharp increase in 'business', which follows (but trails) Covid19 positive test data.
We obviously don't know with any degree of precision how bad things are at the macro scale, but I think it's undeniable that the current trajectory is pretty scary.
[1]: https://doh.sd.gov/news/Coronavirus.aspx
[2]: https://apnews.com/article/virus-outbreak-sioux-falls-voting...