One of the reasons that the 4-20mA standard uses 4mA as the bottom end of the scale, instead of 0mA, is that it differentiates between no signal, and a signal who's value means zero.
0mA = No report, wire/sensor is broken.
4mA = System is OK. Information reported has a value of zero.
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20mA = System OK. Information reported has a value at full scale.
If knowing if your sensor system is OK, you might want to re scale your current to voltage conversion to straight linear where 4mA is 1V, 20mA is 5V and anything much less than 1V means there is a problem.
As for isolation. If in the end, the analog voltage gets turned into a digital value, my preferred way is to do that conversion in front of the isolation.
Use a small uC on the sensor side to sample and convert the voltage, then send the digital result as a transmit only serial bitstream through a cheap optocoupler to the main processor.