The ECB decided to continue running its Pandemic Emergency Purchase Programme (PEPP) at its current clip this quarter to keep borrowing costs stable for governments, companies and households.
While that decision was expected, analysts were awaiting hints about the pace of PEPP after June, after governors including the Netherlands' Klaas Knot raised the prospect of dialling it down.
"Think of a patient which is out of a deep crisis but still on two crutches," Lagarde said.
"You don't want to remove either crutch, the fiscal or the monetary, until the patient can actually walk fine, and to do that means support well into the recovery."
The ECB is working on creating an electronic form of cash to complement banknotes and coin but a digital euro is unlikely to be a reality for four to five years at a minimum.
Loans to non-financial companies rose by 7.6% year-on-year, accelerating from a 7.3% rise in January, the monthly Bank of Italy report on domestic banks' balance sheets showed.
The growth in corporate lending is reversing a trend of sharp contraction over the last decade, driven by guarantees that Rome is providing to support the economy in the face of the COVID-19 epidemic.
The central bank ramped up buying of sovereign bonds after a surge in U.S. Treasury yields lifted borrowing costs in the bloc and threatened Europe's tentative recovery.
Italy started the process of selling new 50-year and 7-year bonds via a syndicate of banks on Wednesday, having flagged the new issues the previous day.
A rally in European shares to near record highs and signs of a pick-up in inflation in big euro zone economies also weighed on euro area bonds, pushing 10-year yields up 4 to 5 basis points across the board.
In turn, Germany's 10-year bond yield rose over 5 bps to -0.26%, its highest level in almost two weeks. This left the gap with its US peers at just over 200 bps and near the widest levels in over a year.
There is a clear risk of self-fulfilling adverse dynamics taking hold, through which uncertain economic prospects induce households, firms and governments to hold back on expenditure plans, leading to a decline in overall demand that validates the loss in confidence about the future.
Hoping to prop up the economy until it is ready to reopen, the ECB has pushed borrowing costs to record lows through copious asset purchases and loans to banks at rates as low as minus 1%.
The number of new confirmed coronavirus cases in Germany rose the most since Jan. 9, while the number of people with COVID-19 in French intensive care units set a high for 2021.
"This underpins our cautious outlook for private consumption, which we do not see returning to pre-crisis levels before the end of 2022," it concluded.
The pan-European STOXX 600 rose 0.2pc, reversing declines from earlier in the session, with automobile stocks rising for a fifth day in the past six sessions.