The question has changed, so to has the answer:
Strings can't be tested using math.isnan
as this expects a float argument. In your countries
list, you have floats and strings.
In your case the following should suffice:
cleanedList = [x for x in countries if str(x) != 'nan']
In your countries
list, the literal 'nan'
is a string not the Python float nan
which is equivalent to:
float('NaN')
In your case the following should suffice:
cleanedList = [x for x in countries if x != 'nan']