The information would be better going the other way.

Instead of always knowing the state the person you wish to call, the caller could state the urgency as part of the protocol. Then you could have a different ringtone for somone phoning for a chat as someone having fallen down a well. You could put one of them on silent, for example, or make it go straight to voicemail.

It’s certainly true that that would a huge improvement, but I’m not sure that way would be better. I suspect people would ignore people more.

Like e-mail importance flag, only self-important ****s would set the status to 'urgent'.